Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Lacy led Alex down the hallway to fetal ultrasound. She charmed a tech into letting them cut the patient line, and once she had Alex lying down on the table, she turned on the machine. She moved the transducer across Alex’s abdomen. At sixteen weeks, the fetus looked like a baby-tiny, skeletal, but startlingly perfect. “Do you see that?” Lacy asked, pointing to a blinking cursor, a tiny black-and-white drumbeat. “That’s the baby’s heart.”

Alex turned her face away, but not before Lacy saw a tear streak down her cheek. “The baby’s fine,” she said. “And it’s perfectly normal to have some staining or spotting. It’s not anything you did that caused it; there’s nothing you can do to make it stop.”

“I thought I was having a miscarriage.”

“Once you see a normal baby, like we just did, the chance of miscarrying is less than one percent. Let me put that another way-your chance of carrying a normal baby to term is ninety-nine percent.”

Alex nodded, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. “Good.”

Lacy hesitated. “It’s not my place to say this, really. But for someone who doesn’t want this baby, Alex, you seem awfully relieved to know she’s all right.”

“I don’t-I can’t-”

Lacy glanced at the ultrasound screen, where Alex’s baby was frozen in a moment of time. “Just think about it,” she said.

I already have a family, Logan Rourke said later that day when Alex told him she planned to keep the baby. I don’t need another one.

That night, Alex had an exorcism of sorts. She filled up her Weber grill with charcoal and lit a fire, then roasted every assignment she’d turned in to Logan Rourke. She had no photos of the two of them, no sweet notes-in retrospect, she realized how careful he’d been, how easily he could be erased from her life.

This baby, she decided, would be hers alone. She sat, watching the flames, and thought of the space it would take up inside her. She imagined her organs moving aside, skin stretching. She pictured her heart shrinking, tiny as a beach stone, to make room. She did not consider whether she was having this baby to prove that she hadn’t imagined her relationship with Logan Rourke, or to upset him as much as he had upset her. As any skilled trial attorney knows, you never ask the witness a question to which you do not know the answer.

Five weeks later, Lacy was no longer just Alex’s midwife. She was also her confidante, her best friend, her sounding board. Although Lacy didn’t normally socialize with her clients, for Alex she’d broken the rules. She told herself it was because Alex-who had now decided to keep this baby-really needed a support system, and there wasn’t anyone else she felt comfortable with.

It was the only reason, Lacy decided, she’d agreed to go out with Alex’s colleagues this evening. Even the prospect of a Girls’ Night Out, without babies, lost its luster in this company. Lacy should have realized two back-to-back root canals would have been preferable to dinner with a bunch of lawyers. They all liked to hear themselves talk, that was clear. She let the conversation flow around her, as if she were a stone in a river, and she kept refilling her wineglass with Coke from a pitcher.

The restaurant was some Italian place with very bad red sauce and a chef who went heavy on the garlic. She wondered if, in Italy, there were American restaurants.

Alex was in the middle of a heated discussion about some trial that had gone to jury. Lacy heard terms being tossed and fielded around the table: FLSA, Singh v. Jutla, incentives. A florid woman sitting to Lacy’s right shook her head. “It’s sending a message,” she said. “If you award damages for work that’s illegal, you’re sanctioning a company to be above the law.”

Alex laughed. “Sita, I’m just going to take this moment to remind you that you’re the only prosecutor at the table and there’s no way in hell you’re going to win this one.”

“We’re all biased. We need an objective observer.” Sita smiled at Lacy. “What’s your opinion on aliens?”

Maybe she should have paid more attention to the conversation-apparently it had taken a turn for the interesting while Lacy was woolgathering. “Well, I’m certainly not an expert, but I did finish a book a little while ago about Area 51 and the cover-up by the government. It went into specific detail about cattle mutilation-I find it very suspicious when a cow in Nevada winds up missing its kidneys and the incision doesn’t show any trauma to tissue or blood loss. I had a cat once that I think was abducted by aliens. She went missing for exactly four weeks-to the minute-and when she came back, she had triangle patterns burned out on the fur on her back, sort of like a crop circle.” Lacy hesitated. “But without the wheat.”

Everyone at the table stared at her, silent. A woman with a pinhole of a mouth and a sleek blond bob blinked at Lacy. “We were talking about illegal aliens.”

Lacy felt heat creep up her neck. “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

“Well, if you ask me,” Alex said, drawing attention in her own direction, “Lacy ought to be heading up the Department of Labor instead of Elaine Chao. She’s certainly got more experience…”

Everyone broke up in laughter, as Lacy watched. Alex, she realized, could fit anywhere. Here, or with Lacy’s family at dinner, or in a courtroom, or probably at tea with the queen. She was a chameleon.

It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.

There was a moment at each prenatal exam when Lacy channeled her inner faith healer: laying her hands on the patient’s belly and divining, just from the lay of the land, in which direction the baby lay. It always reminded her of those Halloween funhouses she took Joey to visit-you’d stick your hand behind a curtain and feel a bowl of cold spaghetti intestines, or a gelatin brain. It wasn’t an exact science, but basically, there were two hard parts on a fetus: the head and the bottom. If you rocked the baby’s head, it would twist on the stem of its spine. If you rocked the baby’s bottom, it swayed. Moving the head moved only the head; moving the bottom moved the whole baby.

She let her hands trail over the island of Alex’s belly and helped her sit up. “The good news is that the baby’s doing fine,” Lacy said. “The bad news is that right now, she’s upside down. Breech.”

Alex froze. “I’m going to need a C-section?”

“We’ve got eight weeks before it comes to that. There’s a lot we can do to try to turn the baby beforehand.”

“Like what?”

“Moxibustion.” She sat down across from Lacy. “I’ll give you the name of an acupuncturist. She’ll take a little stick of mugwort and hold it up to your little pinky. She’ll do the same thing on the other side. It won’t hurt, but it’ll be uncomfortably warm. Once you learn how to do it at home, if you start now chances are fairly good that the baby will turn in one to two weeks’ time.”

“Poking myself with a stick is going to make it flip?”

“Well, not necessarily. That’s why I also want you to set an ironing board up against the couch, to make an inclined plane. You should lie on it, head down, three times a day for fifteen minutes.”

“Jeez, Lacy. Are you sure you don’t want me to wear a crystal, too?”

“Believe me, any of those are considerably more comfortable than having a doctor do a version to turn the baby…or recuperating from a C-section.”

Alex folded her hands over her belly. “I don’t hold much faith in old wives’ tales.”

Lacy shrugged. “Luckily, you’re not the one who’s breech.”

You weren’t supposed to give your clients rides to court, but in Nadya Saranoff’s case, Alex had made an exception. Nadya’s husband had been abusive and had left her for another woman. He wouldn’t pay child support for their two boys, although he was making a decent living and Nadya’s job at Subway paid $5.25 an hour. She’d complained to the state, but justice worked too slow, so she’d gone to Wal-Mart and shoplifted a pair of pants and a white shirt for her five-year-old, who was starting school the following week and who had outgrown all of his clothing.